Design, engineering and commissioning of industrial plants and corresponding control systems is a complex and time consuming process. To simplify the complexities involved, often the engineering is done in phases by various personnel of the automation service provider using various tools. The initial phase involves understanding customer requirements and generating plant specifications by the automation service provider. The automation service provider makes sale proposals by showing prospective engineering diagrams such as process flow diagrams, process and instrumentation (commonly referred to as P&I) diagrams, etc. The prospective engineering diagrams are generally based on the symbol definitions as prescribed by a standard and serve as a major input step towards defining system architectures, network diagrams, logic diagrams, sizing calculations, bill of materials and the like.
In the subsequent phase, on the basis of the prospective engineering diagrams, various engineering artifacts such as I/O lists, conventional plant topology diagrams, etc., are created by adding crucial details and performing necessary operations which are relevant in the context of control engineering and operation. These engineering artifacts are used by control engineers during configuration and commissioning of the devices of the control system.
Conventionally, the generation of engineering artifacts from the prospective engineering diagrams is done manually by automation and control engineers. The task of generation of engineering artifacts requires domain knowledge upon the part of the control engineer and therefore involves high skill related costs. Additionally, this task of conversion and subsequent configuration and commissioning of the devices often includes a lot of basic configurations which are redundant and repeatable which are currently performed manually, thereby leading to an inefficient delivery strategy for large scale engineering projects
Therefore, in light of the above discussion, there is a need for a system and method that solves the problems mentioned above.